Even with the twinge of familiarity surrounding him, I trusted Grams to know we hadn’t met.In all the time I’d been living with her in Grand Orchard, she’d never once called out his name as we walked through the town. He hadn’t greeted her at the shop, or any restaurant along Main Street, or church on Sundays. Not even during the summer, when the college kids all went home and the town shrank down to the size of a pie instead of the entire bakery, had we run into him.
“Let me go get it for you,” I said and headed back up the stairs.
Instead of staying down in the store as any decent person would do, Cormac followed me up the rickety steps. They groaned under his weight even more than mine. He was tall and built, his T-shirt sticking to muscles in a way that clenched my heart even tighter than thoughts of Grandma had. That made me think of another muscled chest that had once been mine.
When we hit the top, Cormac sucked in a breath. The main room had once been used as storage until I’d moved to Grand Orchard. Grams had reinvented it once she’d decided I needed a spot of my own. She’d insisted on emptying the boxes, installing a skylight, and adding a sink in the corner. She said it was a necessity when we both knew it wasn’t. She should have used the money to redo the practice rooms with their soundproofing so old and grungy they looked like Styrofoam stained with coffee.
“Wow. This looks different than when I used to haul the deliveries up here,” he said.
I’d forgotten he’d worked for Grams. She’d told me that in the same breath she’d told me he’d been one of the best students she’d ever had the privilege of teaching. But like all of Gram’s mysteries, she’d kept the rest of him sealed up inside a vault of things to figure out once she’d passed.
I shook my head and pulled the trunk from the top of the apothecary cabinet I’d recommissioned for all my paints. Then, I turned, holding it out to him.
“Here you go,” I said.
His eyebrows lifted, a motion you could barely see because he had his beanie tucked so low.
“I thought it was a box. This is an antique trunk,” he said.
I shrugged. “If you knew Grams, then you knew how much she loved her secrets.”
“What’s in it?”
“Mostly old records. She wouldn’t let me see the rest and made me promise I wouldn’t look. She said it was between the two of you,” I told him, taking the old-fashioned key on a blue ribbon from the hook on the wall and handing it to him.
“Wait. You didn’t look. Not even after…” His voice trailed away, and I swore those dark eyes shone with unshed tears. I hadn’t expected someone who hadn’t seen her in years to care so much that she was gone.
“No. She asked me not to, so I didn’t,” I told him, crossing my arms and backing away because he was exuding some kind of smell or energy or aura that was attacking me in a way I didn’t like. Didn’t want.
“Are you even human?” he asked with an entirely too wicked smile. Completely one-hundred-percent all wickedness.
I grabbed my coat and umbrella from the hooks.
“Is it still raining?” I asked.
He nodded, head tilted, assessing me.
I hated it.
I was tired of being tested. Would she crumble? Would she fall apart? How do we pick her up if she does? But more than all of that, I hated that I had fallen apart. Repeatedly. Over and over again. Four and a half years of falling apart.
I pointed the umbrella toward the stairs. “After you.”
He looked like he’d object. Some macho-istic complaint of females leading the way. My heart gripped tighter. There’d once been someone who would have demanded it. That I go first. This man didn’t. He just nodded, gripped the trunk which was surprisingly heavy, and headed down the stairs.
I followed, flipping off the lights as I went.
We ended up at the front door, and I opened it for him because he had his hands full. I turned the sign in the window toclosed, set the alarm, and then walked out, locking the door behind me. Grams had only been broken into a handful of times, the love she grew in the people around her somehow keeping her safe. Maybe that was just Grand Orchard for you. Safe.
I’d felt safe here.
These last few weeks, though, I hadn’t known what to feel.
We stood under the overhang as the rain continued to float down just beyond it, the drips from the roofline tumbling down and hitting my gray Chucks that used to be white. The ones splotched with paint drops.
“Would you like me to tell you what I find?” he asked, drawing me back to him, eyes twinkling just like Grams’. No wonder she’d had a lot of affection for him. It was surprising that we hadn’t ever met when I’d spent so many weeks with her during the summers. It was as if the world had decided we couldn’t live in the same universe.
And now we were.
